And let’s hope I can forgive him for whatever game he’s playing with us all now.
Past
Rohan
FISA is, apparently, the nesting ground for all of Britain’s most terrifying women.
First I get to meet the director of FISA itself, a forty something ice glacier of a woman called Anabelle Snow. She watches me walk into her office like I’m a wet puppy, shivering with the need to piss all over her fancy carpet.
Snow sits behind her overlarge mahogany desk, dressed in a sharp green pantsuit, her dark hair cut into a severe bob that frames her narrow, pale face and frostbite-inducing blue eyes, and doesn’t say a single word. She lets the silence hang between us in a recognisable power move.
Aaron, the traitor, has abandoned me to wait outside her office, ready to escort me to HR once I’m done being interrogated by the bony ice dragon he works for.
Wework for now, I have to remind myself. I chose this. It’s important to remember shit like that, so when things go sidewise, you know on exactly whose back each lashing of blame is supposed to land. Can’t go around ripping up innocent skin anymore. I’m one of the good guys now.
I hope I get a badge.
Unfortunately for Snow, I’m well adept at handling silence, awkward or otherwise. There were times as a child when OI’s scientists would strap me down to a cold metal table and gouge out reactions with their tools, recording the data for my dad, but would otherwise ignore my existence, no matter how loudly I screamed.
I stand in front of Snow’s desk, arms crossed, hip cocked slightly to lean against a nearby bookcase, mentally calculating the likelihood that one of the books, once pulled on, opens up a secret lair. If the agency is melodramatic enough to have an entire underground base buried in one of England’s largest crime-heavy cities, anything is possible.
To be fair to Snow, when she finally does talk, she asks a question I didn’t expect.
“Why do you hate your father?” She’s still staring me down, a contemplative expression on her angular face.
Since I didn’t realise we were going to be conducting an impromptu therapy session on the fly, I offer her the standard of reply that I think a question like that deserves.
“Because he bought me a Malibu Barbie for Christmas when I specifically asked for a Ballerina Barbie. I mean,hello.” I sweep a hand up and down the length of my body. “What part of this saysMalibu Barbieto you?”
Snow doesn’t even have the common decency to look annoyed by my response. She leans forward in her seat and rests her elbows on her desk, folding her claws together in front of her.
“There were rumours that your mother died recently,” Snow says, eyes boring into me like she’s trying to call bullshit on a magic trick. “Was it your father who pulled the trigger on that, or you?”
It’s a two punch, one blow swiftly following another, right to the solar plexus, a merciless expanse of pain and fury spreading outward like heat from a detonated grenade.
“Dad didn’t fire the bullet,” I tell her, voice gone hard and smooth like fingers running over wet stone, “but he built the gun.”
That’s all she’s getting from me about my mum. Let her think it was me who killed her if she wants to; I don’t give a fuck what this woman believes, and Snow doesn’t strike me as the type to care about hiring people suspected of matricide. What self-respecting head of a shady government agency would put individual morality above community justice?
Snow takes my answer and rolls it around in her mind for about sixty-two seconds before coming back with the answer to a question I didn’t ask.
“We don’t build weapons out of meat and bone here, kid.”
Kid, not doctor. It’s the second time one of these FISA agents has decided I’m not worthy of my title. The lack of respect is genuinely thrilling.
“Maybe not,” I concede, a false peace offering that I don’t expect Snow to fall for. “But you take the weapons that were already built by other people and let them pull their own triggers on your agency’s behalf, right?”
Snow’s thin mouth slices across the bottom of her face, caged between her pointy nose and chin like a creature trapped inside her skull. It’s an ugly smile, different to Aaron’s in that the danger is still hidden behind all that tooth and marrow.
“Is that what you think we’re doing with you?” she prods. “Turning your own father’s weapon back on him?”
“I’m not a gun,” I promise her.
“Hmm,” Snow hums thoughtfully, her eyes narrowing slightly in a mix of interest and scepticism. “Then what are you?”
This time, it’s me cutting my mouth up into something ugly. I push away from Snow’s bookcase and wander closer to her desk, stopping two feet away from it, within spitting distance of her face. She doesn’t move back or flinch. She just tilts her head to glance up at me, patiently waiting for my truth.
I fold my hands behind my back and lightly shrug my shoulders. “I’m what you’d call aninevitable consequence.”
